It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me. I mean, when you try an' operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you've done it. What is this? Some kind of intergalactic hyper-hearse?

What frequency of light does it reflect/absorb. If it is just the visible spectrum, then it would be "totally" black, but if it is reflecting infra-red or ultra-violet, then it would be visible to Predators.

None in commercial production yet, but everyone seems happier with them than George Washington Carver with a peanut.

I take the "none in production" part back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube#Current_applications

The main problem really is scaling it up. It'll get better over time./Remember lasers could only be made with expensive lab equipment.//Now we use them to tease animals.///And blind pilots because we're idiots.

Iczer:Jesus, it's like gazing into the freaking abyss looking at that picture...

Loading it up in a paint program, each of the RGB color values for the black circle appear to be random between 3 and 12 and appears to be very dark shades of greens and yellows. Just barely enough to be distinguishable from pure black. Of course, it's a jpg so no telling what compression has done to it.

LrdPhoenix:Iczer: Jesus, it's like gazing into the freaking abyss looking at that picture...

Loading it up in a paint program, each of the RGB color values for the black circle appear to be random between 3 and 12 and appears to be very dark shades of greens and yellows. Just barely enough to be distinguishable from pure black. Of course, it's a jpg so no telling what compression has done to it.

iaazathot:So, if it is ever 100% black, and no light is reflected back, have you created a black hole?

Different phenomena. A black hole isn't black because of absorption, but because of gravity: light moves too slowly to get more than a certain distance away, once it's gone inside that distance. That distance is called the event horizon, and this is what we see as the "edge" of the hole, even though it's actually some distance away from the singularity at its core. The actual object could reflect or even emit light, but even if it does, that light can't get beyond the event horizon anyway, so it still looks black. Even out to some distance beyond the event horizon, a black hole's gravity is so strong that it can still bend light toward it: this light still gets away in the end, but it has been bent, like it went through a lens. This is called gravitational lensing, and it is responsible for (among other things) the ring of light that you see around some depictions of black holes.

This stuff is different. It can't bend light that gets close to it, like a black hole can: it can only absorb light that actually hits it. It does a very, very good job of that -much better than typical "black" materials- but it's not destroying or trapping information the way a black hole does.

None in commercial production yet, but everyone seems happier with them than George Washington Carver with a peanut.

I take the "none in production" part back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube#Current_applications

You can actually buy them in reasonably large quantities from places like Sigma Aldrich. They can be incredibly expensive, though. Still a pain to synthesize. I did some research on the use of nanotubes (graphene, actually) as a filler material in plastic composites in college. Has a lot of potential.

lindseyp:It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me. I mean, when you try an' operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you've done it. What is this? Some kind of intergalactic hyper-hearse?